Released on December 18th 1998 by ASCII Entertainment, AI Shogi 3 is the second
Shogi game to be released on the N64. The AI Shogi series was originally created
by programmer Hiroshi Yamashita in 1991 when it came 4th in the World Computer
Shogi Championship. It would go on to win the championship in 1997, 2004 and
2007. It has also won the Computer Olympiad competition three times. It is
considered one of the strongest AI shogi programs and has been certified by the
Japan Shogi Association as an amateur five-dan shogi player.
It was first commercially released in 1993 for the the NEC PC98. Other titles in
the series have also been released on the Sega Saturn, the PS1, the 3DO, the
Bandai Pippin, the PS2, and the Nintendo DS. Hiroshi Yamashita continues to
develop the AI Shogi series with his company AI Factory. The most recent release
was in 2015 with AI Shogi 19 for Microsoft Windows.
The game starts with a pretty cool scene of a camera flying through the inside
of an Nintendo 64 and zooming in on a processor. However the game has almost no
music and only has a couple of modes. There is no competition/tournament mode,
so even for Shogi fans this is pretty disappointing. For those reasons I would
rate this as the worse of the three shogi games.
This game needs 111 pages on a controller pak if you want to save your game
data.
2.Translation guide
The main menu is as follows
Play a game
Environment Settings
Load a game
If you choose to start a new game the following settings screen will be shown
The two players are shown on the left and right, you can set either player to be
a CPU or a human player. The CPU has difficulty settings from 1-5.
Under that you can set who goes first.
Then you have three more options
Handicaps - 平手 means no handicap. Otherwise you can choose to remove pieces.
Start the game
Go back to the game settings
Environment Settings
Here you have the following options, あり means on and なし means off
Choose a background
Display the logical next move
Countdown on or off
Sound effects on or off
Display the next direct move
Display a warning
Display the places where pieces can move to
3.Walkthrough
You need to be able to recognize the kanji for each piece in order to use this
guide. The pieces are as follows, with the piece they are most similar to in
chess, the meaning of their name and then the kanji as it appears in the game.
Higher ranked players sometimes have a differently named king, 王將
Pieces that reach the end of the board are promoted and are shown with red kanji
as follows
In this guide I will refer to spaces on the board in the following way. 9 to 1
across the top, and A to I from top to bottom. This is not traditional shogi
notation, but I hope it easier to understand for those people who do not know
shogi notation. So in the traditional opening of a game, the board looks like
this:
９８７６５４３２１
香桂銀金王金銀桂香 A
飛 角 B
歩歩歩歩歩歩歩歩歩 C
D
E
F
歩歩歩歩歩歩歩歩歩 G
角 飛 H
香桂銀金王金銀桂香 I
Apologies for the messy formatting, its the best I can do with all the different
kanji sizes and combinations of Latin characters.
If you follow this guide, you will take and promote pieces automatically but I
have included those instructions in order to make it easier to understand. In
shogi you can also put spare pieces or pieces you have captured on the board if
you wish to. You can do this in game by moving the cursor to the extra pieces at
the bottom right of the screen. At the end of every game your opponent will
resign so there will be no long drawn out games.
